Bee: Nature’s Tiny Miracle

The press release for this book claims that its story will encourage young readers to take an interest in the threatened situation of the bee. But this pleasant picture book, with some rather unnecessary cut-through holes in the pages, offers nowhere near the necessary level of explanation to make this likely. A commentary in rhyming couplets charts a single bee’s travels through an attractively illustrated countryside, and then, after our bee alerts the hive, we watch the pollinating activities of its swarm, ending on the assertion that ‘Every plant and flower you see/ Was given life by one small bee’. This is true enough, but I don’t think that, relying on this book alone, anyone would be any wiser how this happens. The ‘gift of pollen’ is mentioned but fertilisation and seed production is not explained. The rhyming text is sometimes strained and at least once botanically misleading: the bee buzzes over the pond ‘where wild thyme grows’. Well, it won’t grow on the pond. It might just grow on the banks of the pond, but it’s usually found in dryer places. There is also a lack of precision in illustration and text about what time of year is being depicted. To be fair, at least some of Britta Teckentrup’s flora and fauna seem to be purely imaginative, but there are identifiable spring flowers, bluebells and apple blossom, jostling with summer blooms, sunflowers and lilies. In other words, it’s a picture book that doesn’t quite know what it wants to do. Is it providing a nature lesson about bees or is it offering something that just looks and sounds lyrically wonderful about nature without any claims to be accurate? I think it could have been done better.